Late Victorian Holocausts: El Niño Famines and the Making of the Third World

Как часто мы слышим, что в России всё не так, а на Западе мудрое правительство и демократические институты заботятся чуть ли не о каждой душе? Как часто нам говорят, что только восточные правители устраивают социальные эксперименты над населением? «Ну, конечно, там рай, а здесь ад. Вот и весь разговор». Утверждения такого рода, как правило, делаются либо ввиду слабой осведомленности о фактах мировой истории, либо ввиду намеренного игнорирования нелицеприятных моментов в развитии Запада. Книга «Холокосты поздневикторианской эпохи» подымает одну из таких замалчиваемых тем, позволяет закрыть пробелы в знаниях и не дает апологетам капитализма отделаться от обвинений фразой «вы не понимаете, это другое».

О чем речь, если вкратце? В своем книге Майк Дэвис исследует такое климатическое явление как ENSO (ЭНЮК или же Эль-Ниньо-Южное колебание) и его влияние на целый ряд стран по всему миру: Индию, Китай, Бразилию, Эфиопию и так далее. Если сов��ем упрощенно, тем более я сам не географ и не метеоролог, ENSO представляет собой явление усиления/угасания пассатных ветров, которое приводит к переносу теплых слоев водных масс с запада Тихого океана на восток. В результате с малопредсказуемой периодичностью изменяется география осадков во многих краях света. ENSO имеет два крайних эпизода существования: теплый — Эль-Ниньо и холодный — Ла-Нинья. Первый вызывает засухи, второй – наводнения. В конце XIX века крайних эпизодов существования было три и все они вызвали неурожай и голод, а затем и болезни (дизентерия, холера, оспа и т.п.). В результате погибли десятки миллионов людей по всему миру (оценки разнятся, но цифры укладываются в диапазон от 30 до 60 миллионов). Больше всего пострадавших было как раз в Индии, Китае и Бразилии.

Но дело в том, что ENSO существовал задолго до XIX века – откуда же такое количество жертв в поздневикторианскую эпоху? Неужели пострадавшие страны за сотни лет до этого не научились бороться с периодическими засухами и наводнениями? Неужели они не создали механизмы, позволяющие смягчить удары природы? Как показывает Дэвис, механизмы действительно существовали, но к XIX веку они оказались разрушены. Индия, Китай, Египет, Марокко, Эфиопия, Бразилия и так далее – все они как раз к тому моменту оказались встроенными в мировую экономику, что привело к самым ужасающим для этих регионов последствиям. Оказалось, что такими вопросами, что сеять и производить, что вывозить, какие ирригационные системы строить и поддерживать, как облагать налогами и пошлинами крестьян и фермеров, как распределять социальную помощь и т.д. и т.п. – всеми этими вопросами стали по сути заправлять воротилы из Лондона и Манчестера. Далее оказалось, что эти воротилы находят вполне нормальным руководствоваться такими принципами как «пусть они не доедят, но зерно должны вывезти», «кто не работает, тот пусть подыхает с голода», «пусть кругом умирают, но мы потратим деньги на продвижение нашей идеологии (например, на празднование юбилея королевы)» и т.д. И никакой ENSO не может заставить воротил отклониться от своих принципов. В общем ничего личного, просто бизнес.

Именно такой хищнический капитализм западных держав, по Дэвису, и привел к такому количеству смертей во время трех больших засух конца XIX века. “Millions died, not outside the ‘modern world system’ but in the very process of being forcibly incorporated into its economic and political structures. They died in the golden age of Liberal Capitalism; indeed, many were murdered…by the theological application of the sacred principles of Smith, Bentham and Mill”.

Книга читается тяжело, но ее прочтение необходимо для понимания, что такое колониализм, как сформировались страны третьего мира, и что было сделано не так. Рекомендую.

P.S. На обложке книги сверху фотография вице-короля Индии Роберта Литтона (по совместительству поэта и, кстати, сына известного писателя XIX века Эдварда Бульвер-Литтона), а снизу фотография голодающих в Индии во время Великой засухи 1876-1878 гг. Такое противопоставление сытого аристократа-чиновника и изможденных крестьян неслучайно. Как пишет Дэвис: "The contemporary photographs used in this book are…intended as accusations, not illustrations”.

This book is devastating and beautiful. Davis explains world-wide mass famines as not just acts of God, but as political decisions made by colonialists who did not see the starving people as humans. This is an excellent companion to books like Orientalism and recently Hickel's The Divide and How to hide an empire--poverty in developing countries has a lot more to do with the actions of the developed world than their own actions.

In the late 19th century, in the years 1876-79, 1889-91 and 1896-1902, severe drought and famines lashed across Asia, Africa, and South America. An estimated 12-29 million people died in India, 20-30 million in China, 2 million in Brazil and about one-third of the population in Ethiopia and Sudan. Apart from this, drought and famine were reported to have severely affected people in Java, Phillippines, New Caledonia, Korea, southern Africa and the Maghreb. In India, nearly half of all the deaths occurred in Madras. As I read the book, I was shocked that I, who grew up and went to high-school and University in Madras, had never been aware of this part of our history till I came across this book now. No history book in all my years of education in Madras even mentioned anything about this. I thought that this is one more instance of independent India’s callous attitude in the way they teach us our history. However, author Mike Davis says that these great famines are the missing pages from every Victorian era chronicle as well. The Irish potato famine of 1845-49 and the Russian famine of 1891-92 are well documented but not the late Victorian era famines in India. Davis estimates that between 32 and 61 million people died from these famines in China, India, Egypt, and Brazil.

The research in this book shows that all the drought had an origin in the El Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO) phenomenon as a climatic cause. Rapid warming of the eastern Pacific (called El Niño events) is associated with a weak monsoon and synchronous drought in vast parts of Asia, Africa, and north-eastern South America. When the eastern Pacific is unusually cool, the pattern reverses (called La Niña events), and abnormal precipitation and flooding occur in the same region. The extraordinary droughts of 1876, 1896-97, 1899-1900 and 1902 correlate firmly with El Niño events. However, Nature causes only droughts. Man and society cause famines and the vast number of deaths.

In the author’s research, the chief culprits of this holocaust were the European imperialist empires, with Japan and the US playing smaller, but similar roles. He lays the blame on the forced imposition of free-market economics on their colonies, the destruction, and decline of indigenous irrigation, methods of colonial revenue settlements and the new Gold Standard as contributing to the famines in these times. Imperialism also saw each drought as an opportunity to grab more land. Lord Carnarvon used the 1877 southern African drought to strike against the Zulus, Francesco Crispi advanced Italian interests in the Horn of Africa during the 1889-91 Ethiopian famine, Wilhelmine Germany exploited the floods and drought in Shandong in the 1890s to expand Germany’s hold in northern China and the US crushed Emilio Aguinaldo’s Phillippines Republic using famine-drought in the same period. Japan preyed upon a weakened Korea in the famines of 1876 and exacted favorable terms in its rice trade which resulted in the export of rice from Korea to Japan even as Korea was reeling under drought and famine.

In India, the British administration exploited starvation in Madras to recruit huge armies of hungry, indentured coolies. They hired over 480000 from Madras alone, in 1876-79 for semi-slave labor on British plantations in Ceylon, Mauritius, Guyana, and Natal. Similar migrations happened in 1896-97 also. At the same time, after installing the railroad, the British created national level grain markets in India. The unitary market caused price inflation to the rural poor in grain surplus districts. The perverse consequence of this was the export of food grains from famine-stricken areas to more prosperous markets by rail and the import of famine to the rural poor. Added to this was the British Raj’s punitive taxation of irrigation, agriculture, and neglect of traditional wells and reservoirs.

Author Mike Davis contrasts this with the earlier Moghul administration. The British routinely castigated the Moghul rulers as despots and called Moghul India as full of depravity. Davis says that Moghul India till the 1770s was mostly free of famines. In pre- British India, markets were caste-based and local, and the road infrastructure was inadequate. These caused transport bottlenecks and made it difficult for the state to intervene too much in peasant life. As a result, village-level food reserves were more substantial, patrimonial welfare more widespread and grain prices in surplus areas were better insulated against speculation. The author writes that recent research by Ashok Desai shows that the average standard of food consumption in emperor Akbar’s empire was appreciably higher than the India of 1960s. The Moghul state regarded the protection of the peasant as an essential obligation. Akbar, Shahjehan, and Aurangzeb relied on four fundamental policies - embargoes on food exports, anti-speculative price regulation, tax relief and distribution of free food without a forced labor counterpart. The Famine Commission report of 1880 cites Aurangzeb’s extraordinary relief campaign during the drought-famine of 1661. It says that Emperor Aurangzeb opened his treasury and granted money without stint. He gave every encouragement to the import of corn and either sold it at reduced prices or distributed it gratuitously among those who were too impoverished to pay. He acknowledged the need for remitting the rents of cultivators and relieving them temporarily of taxes. His strenuous efforts were credited to have saved millions of lives.

So, are we to think that pre-British India was free of hunger and famines? Are self-contained village communities the solution for India, just as Mahatma Gandhi wanted? Should we opt for a patrimonial monarchy instead of a democratic republic? It is easy for Indians to be carried away by all this indictment of the British and start believing in such a romantic notion. Mike Davis even encourages such an idea by quoting the Hungarian-American political economist Karl Polanyi’s work of 1944 approvingly as follows: “...the actual source of famines in the last fifty years was the free marketing of grain combined with local failure of incomes; Indians died because the Indian village community was destroyed in favor of market capitalism by the British…”. The book also documents how the railroad infrastructure was used to export grains for profit away from famine-stricken villages. Grains went to Britain in search of higher profits, especially during famines.

It is important to remember that transport infrastructure enables access to larger markets by rural producers. Such access allows them to better their material life during good times in a way that helps them save up for leaner times. The problem was not the railways or roads or even the markets. It was the way these were used by the ruling British dictatorship detrimentally. If we look at the same region today, in Tamilnadu and Kerala, there is an integrated road and rail network, but coupled with democracy and political and economic freedoms. These two states also happen to be the two with high Human Development Indexes in India today. In this context, it is crucial to precisely understand what Prof. Amartya Sen had said about famines and democracy. Mostly, we attribute the saying ‘Famines do not occur in democracies’ to him. I think this is somewhat misquoted and out of context. It is true that India has not had a famine since independence and democracy in 1947. However, that does not mean that democracy solves the problem of hunger and starvation automatically. India still has farmers committing suicides in their thousands due to the burden of debt and poverty. Democracy needs to be combined not only with political and economic freedoms but equal economic opportunities as well. Employment and welfare measures must be given to support the bottom rung of society so that they can get a leg up in fighting hunger and malnutrition. Indian democracy forces the ruling elite in preventing outlier events like famines. However, it does not force them to act with alacrity in combating hunger and malnutrition in a similar vein. Unless we banish hunger, we cannot rest on the laurels of ‘democracy and famines cannot co-exist.’

Mike Davis' book is a scholarly work, with much scientific discussion on the ENSO phenomenon and a lot of meticulously researched data on colonial history and its effects on countries like India and China. It draws on diverse disciplines like history, political economy, meteorological science, and the environment. In this review, I have mostly focused on the Indian experience of the late Victorian famines. The book, however, has chapters devoted to the Chinese and the African experience as well. A Marxian view of history inspires the author's outlook. It is evident in his passionate language in support of the ‘third world’ and the denunciation of High Imperialism. The book endeavors to show that imperial policies towards starving subjects were the exact equivalents of bombs dropped from 18000 feet in Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and Dresden. A ‘veritable Black Book of liberal capitalism’ as Tariq Ali has eloquently endorsed it.

Oh boy were parts of this a slough to get through. I wasn't in it for the hard science, so Part 3 of the book (despite being the shortest) took me by FAR the longest to read through. The entire book was also made somewhat inaccessible to someone without an in-depth understanding of the history of China, Brazil, and India due to what felt like obscure references that were never explained.

I feel like I learned something and am glad to have read it, but did not necessarily enjoy the process of reading it.

"If the history of British rule in India were to be condensed into a single fact, it is this: there was no increase in India's per capita income from 1757 to 1947." Mike Davis is a wonderful writer and an excellent researcher. This book is no exception to his usually high standards.

Starting off with a very useful explanation of the El Niño, Southern Oscillation cycle, Davis goes on to analyse how European imperialism and climate factors went hand in hand to engineer a dramatic increase in living standards for Europeans, whilst immiserating the rest of the globe.

El Niño is not new, and countries that are particularly vulnerable to it are not unfamiliar with how to handle it. Imperial China and Mughal India both had systems of famine relief in the event that the monsoon fail. However, with the arrival of European free-traders expounding their Smith and Benthamite creed, grain was produced in India to be sold in Europe. Any famine relief was deemed to be bad for the market.

Taking in turn the racist policies that led to the creation of permanent poverty in Brazil, India and China this is a harrowing book that reveals how Europeans deliberately chose policies that were designed to create a global underclass. This was all done to ensure that, in particular, British exports would have a captive market, whilst resources could be obtained cheaply from colonies with a devastating effect on both local and global climate. Read this book, it is incredibly important to understand why the Global South exists in the state it is in. There is nothing "natural" or accidental about it. As Davis points out, India and China were the largest economic powers of their time. By the time the Brits and other European empires had had their way, they were repositories of mass poverty.

Davis does a really great job of challenging the ideas of benevolent British empiricism as he looks at the ways colonial policy inflamed casualty numbers of natural disasters and ultimately led to the creation of what we now call the "third world."

Davis' argument is strongest when he is discussing British India, this is where his research really shines through. His conclusions on China and Brazil, in my opinion, are a bit lacking, and the book's overall absence of a conclusion leaves the reader wanting.

For the most, part the first half of the book is organized well. The first two sections are great and really make his point. The third section is all about the science of El Nino(ENSO) and seem, to me, to be a bit out of place. The final section is where he claims he is going to argue his point about how new imperialism made the third world, although his arguments in the first two sections do a better job than in the last section, especially for China and Brazil.

Organization aside, Davis clearly has done his research and the book stands as a horrific testament to the realities of British Imperialism.

You cannot disagree with his arguments.
Makes you wanna go on hungerstrike.
"The conquest of the earth ... is not a pretty thing ... " truth to that.

This is a fantastic and detailed history of a subject to which a lot of modern history discussions have a strange amnesia.

Frankly, the subject matter is a difficult one, and at times the content of this book is horrific. So the reader should be warned, but is encouraged to bear witness to colonial crimes as exposed here in painful, sober detail.

Mike Davis sets out in unrivalled detail the impact of the disastrous El Nino of the 1870s combined with colonial policies in the global south. Davis investigates the effects through the lenses of economics, science, politics, and the history of ideas, articulating a convincing and thoroughly researched explanation over why these famines were as deadly as they were.

Perhaps the only shortcoming of this work is the absence of a conclusion which would have made Davis' argument just that little bit clearer, especially for the non-scholarly reader like myself.

Nonetheless, highly recommended for anyone interested in the "reality" behind the ideology of 19th century empires; the social realities of famine; or more generally in exemplerary works of historical material analysis.